This invention relates to rare gas and rare gas-additive lasers and more particularly to electron-beam-pumped and electron-beam-controlled (EBC) XeF lasers in which neon is used as a diluent gas.
It is well known in the prior art that lasers of various types are in use and experimentation with new types is always under study. Such lasers include solid state, chemical and gaseous types. These laser types are pumped by intense light sources, other lasers, electron beam, and plasma sources. Rare gas-halide lasers have been in existence for a few years with improvements in their operation being made with time and further knowledge being obtained through experimentation. Heretofore several rare gas-halogen species have been made to lase by pumping with an electron beam. These lasers produce relatively short pulse lengths. In these prior-art systems, argon gas has been used as the diluent because its stopping power for electrons was found to be superior to other rare gases. Argon is also essential because it forms an intermediate state leading to the desired excited-state species via the displacement reaction. It has been determined that the presence of a large transient absorption will significantly reduce the efficiency of a XeF laser and will limit the optical length to which these lasers can operate. This places restrictions on those rare gas-halogen systems which can be made to operate at longer pulse lengths by electron beam pumping.
There are several criteria for selecting the rare gas diluent for electron-beam-pumped and electron-beam-controlled lasers operating in ultraviolet regions of the spectrum. When these criteria are satisfied, the transient absorption can be significantly reduced, improved performance and scalability will result for the existing long-pulse lasers and new long-pulse lasers will be obtained.